In one of the most significant moves in sports media, the NBA has massively invested in the global distribution of its content, bringing American basketball into the homes of tens of millions of fans worldwide. On platforms like Sky and major international streaming services, European fans can follow games, replays and NBA analysis practically at any time of day.

In this context, one claim resonates above all others. For many years it has been the trademark of NBA marketing, appearing in countless commercials, transitions and communication materials. It is the phrase with which arguably the world’s most famous league introduces itself to all its listeners: This is Why We Play.

This is why we play

“This is why we play” has not always been the NBA’s slogan. Many impactful phrases have accompanied the league now led by Adam Silver, from “where amazing happens” to “I love this game” and the distant “NBA Action, it’s fantastic!”

It is easy to see that from a communication and marketing standpoint, we are witnessing a major leap. Setting aside “NBA Action, it’s fantastic!” — so 1980s it could have appeared in an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air — both “where amazing happens” and the iconic “I love this game” spoke to the same audience, albeit in a different language. They were slogans that, in very different ways, described the pleasure of watching basketball and the emotion received in return. Watch our games, something incredible will happen, the league suggested, having only a few years earlier put the words “I love this game” in the fan’s own mouth.

Why is “This is why we play” different? Where is the leap?

First, as is easy to see, the pronoun changes: “I” becomes “we” — it is more inclusive, more collective. There is no longer a solitary spectator locked in their room watching the spectacular feats of the great champions, but there is us, the basketball people, a collective and — more importantly — a community. Community deserves particular emphasis, because this, as marketing teaches us, is where the great hidden value of every communication campaign lies. In 2024, the NBA counts over 100 million followers on its official social media channels alone: a real community, not just a metaphor.

Yet the great revolution is not in the pronoun, but in its association with the verb play: it is we who play. This is a very important conceptual and narrative leap: suddenly the focus of the campaign shifts to a viewer/actor who is not only present, but very active.

As many commentators have argued, there is an important cognitive gap to bridge: what lies in the space between “I love (watching) this sport” and “this is why we play”? Is there an attempt at equalization, a desire to put everyone on the same level? In terms of sports marketing there are, probably, very precise reasons. To understand them, we need to step back and return to a fundamental concept: who is the consumer of sport.

The sports consumer: between spectator and participant

It is difficult to put a precise label on the sports consumer, since the very concept of a sports product is broad and varied. A sports consumer is someone who buys a season ticket, who purchases a streaming subscription to follow Formula 1, who buys merchandise or who joins a gym. On the other hand, a sports consumer is also someone who signs up for a marathon, who rents a field to play football with friends, or who goes skiing on Sundays. These figures, so apparently different, are all sports consumers, precisely because they interact with sports products, even if very different ones.

The most celebrated structured classification of sports consumers arrived around the mid-1990s (Milne, Sutton & McDonald, 1996) and definitively divided the sports audience into two macro-categories:

• The Spectator Consumer
• The Participant Consumer, or practitioner

Although the distinction between the two groups is obvious, the theoretical framework still holds today among sports marketing scholars, who use it as a starting point for various theories on motivations for sport consumption (Milne et al., 1996; Lascu et al., 1995; Sloan, 1985; Stone, 1971; Zillmann et al., 1979). One of the main points of interest in the doctrine is the relationships that exist between these two different consumers: are they completely different types of people driven by different motivations, or are these definitions very “fluid”, with large areas of overlap?

One of the most interesting readings on the subject comes when we begin to examine together not just types of spectators, but types of spectators based on types of sport. The Gaussian curve resulting from the intersection of these two elements opens up a research field as simple as it is surprising, and one that has rapidly become the starting point for the actions of any sports team or sponsor.

Spectators and participants: what we really do with sport

Let us look schematically at how the two consumer categories — participant and spectator — intersect in practice in specific types of sport: the pink areas represent spectators, the yellow areas participants, and the orange areas the overlap between the two.

Take a sport like basketball. The set of practitioners is smaller than the spectators, and almost entirely contained within the larger diagram. Those who play basketball almost always also watch it, but the reverse is not true. The same situation is amplified even further in football: according to FIFA 2024 data, over 5 billion people follow football as spectators, compared to about 265 million registered players globally.

Then there are very balanced situations, like golf or tennis, where an excellent balance between practitioners and spectators is evident, with decent — though not extensive — overlap. Not coincidentally, tennis and golf are — despite appearances — very similar disciplines in terms of target audience and social demographics of their consumers: elegant, expensive sports, played mainly alone and within clubs.

Finally, there are absolutely extreme situations, like Formula 1 or running. F1 — whose global cumulative audience exceeded 1.5 billion unique viewers in 2023 according to Liberty Media — has only 20 active drivers, compared to tens of millions of fans. As for running, the opposite extreme applies: in a world where nearly everyone has said at least once “I’m going for a run today”, very few watch marathons or running events as spectators.

Spectators and participants: what sports properties do

While what has been said so far may be interesting for fans and practitioners, the game is even more important for companies and brands in sport.

Like a great game of Risk, sports product owners have quickly realized that the expansion and success of their business depends on conquering those parts of the graph that are the opposite color to their own.

Rather than conquering entirely new audiences, evangelizing them from scratch, the preference is to target consumers of that sport who do not yet fall within our circle. This obviously depends on whether the companies and brands sell products for spectators (NBA, Manchester United, Dorna, Wimbledon to name a few) or for participants (Nike, Under Armour, the local gym, e-bike manufacturers…).

Let us use a very concrete example to explain these concepts. I am a great lover of motorsport. A sport with a very wide following but very few practitioners, for various reasons: it is quite expensive, inconvenient to practice, requires a lot of technical know-how and needs important infrastructure. In that sense, companies that produce for motorsport spectator consumers do great business with me: streaming subscriptions, merchandise, licensed products and video games fill my wish list and empty my wallet. I am in the pink circle — to use the colors of the graph — and all brands that produce for the pink circle are very happy with me. Yet I do not practice motorsport (yellow circle) and all brands that produce for that area do not see a penny from me. What is their objective? To move into the pink zone, to find new consumers. How will they do it? With incentive activities (driving courses, track days, test drives) aimed at the spectator consumer audience.

As is easy to understand, trying to convert spectators into practitioners — and practitioners into avid spectators — is far simpler than bringing entirely new consumers into the graph. It is interesting to note that this movement towards the opposite part of the graph happens in both directions simultaneously, but with one common denominator: inclusion.

If you have a body, you are an athlete

One need only look around to understand that all those who create sports products are adopting increasingly inclusive communication and marketing policies. It is enough to see what the great European football clubs are doing at the grassroot level — with academies open to everyone, community programs and neighborhood activations — or to think about how Nike is trying to equate the occasional runner with the great athlete, to understand this attempt to overlap spectators and practitioners. “If you have a body, you are an athlete” reads the large inscription inside Nike Stores around the world, definitively closing the circle on what has been said so far.

According to Nielsen Fan Insights 2024, 77% of global sports fans also consider themselves occasional practitioners of at least one sport: a very high overlap that confirms how the theoretical distinction between the two categories is increasingly porous in contemporary reality. The smartest brands — from major sports brands to sports properties themselves — work precisely on this blurred boundary, seeking to expand it.

Trying to convince a fan to practice sport, and conversely convincing a committed practitioner to become an avid spectator, is one of the keys to modern sports marketing. A marketing world where almost no one tries to attract disinterested consumers or those outside our circle diagram.

The phrase “This is why we play” mentioned at the opening now takes on different meaning. With it, the NBA speaks to all basketball practitioners worldwide, trying to make them spectator consumers. The message, paraphrased, is: if you play basketball, then within our programs and our world lies the excellence of the game itself, the very reason why the game exists. You becomes us. We are not asking you to watch, we are telling you to play together.

It is a strong and omnidirectional inclusion: there are no geographies, social or class differences and — above all — no levels of skill or talent. What the NBA is doing, to return to the graph, is not pushing the boundaries of its own circle, but pulling the boundaries of the adjacent yellow circle, with the goal of making them completely overlapping.

Is it possible that such a maelstrom of notions, concepts, theories and didactic scruples is really contained in 5 words? And is it possible that the public understands or at least intuits such reasoning and modifies its behavior? The answer is of Schrödingerean memory and is simultaneously Yes and No. Like all great communicative processes, like all great transitions in sports marketing, these passages too only work if inserted in a holistic context, uniform and coherent. The passage between the two types of consumers does not happen through a phrase, but through a system of actions: from communication to the creation and management of fan zones, from merchandise management to ticketing policies, from online and offline activations to goodwill — everything counts.

The aim here is not to convince the reader that 25 years of sports communication theory can fit inside five words. On the contrary, the point is that those five words are the product of this theoretical and social backdrop, and they are a signal of the movements underway: small, slow and composed of a microcosm of elements — a kind of tectonic plates movement of sports marketing.

In this too lies the beauty, and the poetry, of this world.